#439: JWST and the Old, Cold Exoplanet

Hi there, Thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley. Coming up on this episode, we're going to be looking at a photograph. Yeah, it's finally time for us to share our family photos with you. Now it's not James Webb Space Telescope has taken a photo of an exoplanet. It's not the first time it's taken a direct photo of an exoplanet, but this one is very old and very cold. And we'll tell you why. They've spotted spots on Mars. And the spots that they've spotted could mean we've spotted life as it was. Possibly we'll put a spot on that and talk about it later. And a Danish astronomer that dates back about four hundred years or so, Ticko Brye, is in the news. We'll tell you why on this edition of Space Nuts fifteen in Channel ten nine. Ignition Space Nuts or three two red ones Space Nuts and actually bought it Bills Good. And the man who's always spot on with his astronomy and space science is Professor Fred What's an astronomer at large. Fresh Very nice segue there, and thank you for that. Couldn't help It couldn't help. It. Gee, it's cold here. We have been hit with a real, a real plunge in the temperatures. Last week we had a couple of days where it got seven to eighteen, seven to nineteen degrees, which in the middle of July is beautiful, but it came back with a vengeance the other day. We've been plunging to minuses in the early morning and barely reaching double figures during the day. And it's sunny. That's the weird part. It is really cold and sunny, and that's not a combination that's very, very common around here. If it's cold, it's usually bleakish as well. But the days are beautiful, but the. Air is freezing, and I'm well, I believe it's because of an effect that's happened in Antarctica, where the troposphere rose fifty degrees in just a couple of days, and that causes a really big impact on the cold air in Antarctica and just pushes it north, and that's what's causing I don't believe. There, you, Gil, and I certainly knew it was a blust of Antarctica that you were getting, which is cold and dry, which I guess is why you've got flear sculls as well. Yeah, yeah, it's lovely, but go outside your fingers starting and you think what's going supposed to be warm? With apologies to our Canadian listeners who want to go far worse than this every year. Yes, yes, indeed, although they've been dealing with forest. Fire opposite just but we were in Juster earlier this year. We were there last year, and while we were there we were getting fire warnings on our phones. And here we are a year later and it's happening all again. It's just become part of the landscape in most countries these days. Unfortunately. Everything good with you, Fred. It's so acceptable. Yes, thank you, that's agreeing. Well, no, I guess the correct word, Andrew is nominal. Everything's not nominal. Yeah, that's a great word. All right, and now let us get into a few stories. But before we get into the main crutch of it, you've got some news on SpaceX. We were talking about the Falcon rockets a couple of weeks ago and some issues there. Things have changed, yes they have. So. Falcon nines were grounded after the failure of the second stage of one of them. We did talk about it and it resulted in an attempt to rescue some of the satellites that were twenty two or twenty three Starling satellites that were supposed to be being orbited, but they didn't make it. And I think even though they made contact with some of the the satellites, they didn't get them into stable orbits. So SpaceX has investigated the problem was a liquid oxygen leak to do with insulation around that upper stage engine. There's a quote from SpaceX which is the cause of the leak was identified as a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle's oxygen system. The line cracked due to fatigue caused by high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line. Despite the leak, the second stage continue to operate throughout the duration of the first burn, completed its engine shut down where it ends to the coast phase of the mission intended for the parking orbit. The second second burn of the upper stage was planned to circularize the orbit ahead of the satellite deployment, but that didn't work. Basically, a long story short, but that's all been accepted by the FAA. I think that's the organization that actually has to ratify the capability to launch, and they've taken remedial steps. I think they've actually got rid of that particular pressure sensor, which has solved the problem, and so they now have to go ahead to launch, and in fact they've they've already carried out I think more than one launch. I think they've done three this week. Very good. Berg. I think I read something the other day that it's said that rocket launchers are becoming so common. There's I think there's almost one a day in the world. That's what you're getting on that way. Yes, yeah, when you go back to the fifties and sixties, they there were a rare thing, but now they've just become so very common. In fact, a lot of them don't even make the news because it's just that thing that's right. Yes, Now, before we continue, I just want to say a loo to a few of our live viewers, one of which is Misty. Misty is an administrator on the Space Nuts podcast group Facebook page, so it gives me a chance to publicly say thank you for all what she does for us behind the scenes, keeping people in line on Facebook. That's a big job. And hello to Danny and regular question on our live feeds is board broke build So hello to all of you. Now Fred the James Webspace telescopes in the news. Again, that's very rare as well. Be a fabulous job. I have to say, yes, it has, and it's been able to take direct photographs of exoplanets. Prior to that, we've got artists' renditions of what an exoplanet might look like and they're fantastic. But these are direct photos, although they tend to be a bit fuzzy. But this latest photograph of an exoplanet is a bit different from others because it's possibly the oldest one they've ever found, and it's a darn cold place, that's right. So this is basically a star whose name is Epsilon Hindi A. It's in the constellation of Indus Southern hemisphere constellation. It's about twelve light years away, but it has a planet which has been suspected because of other observations. I'm not sure what they were, whether they were I think there were radio velocity observations. That means the Doppler wobble technique where you actually analyze the velocity of the parent star, and since that's sort of varying periodically, you can tell that there's a planet pulling it out of place. And that's the certainly the initial way in which most extra planets were found. And then it went over to the transit method, where you look at the dimming of a star as a planet moves in front of it. So this planet was its existence was suspected, but it's turned out with the as exactly as you've said, with the fact that we now have an image of this planet, which is called exelon indab because the bee stands for the planet, and it's actually I think it's puzzled the scientists. It's and in fact the scientists who are working on this are at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. Of colleagues who work there, but I don't know this particular one Elizabeth Matthews, who's the lead author of this paper. And Elizabeth says, well, we expect it to image a planet in this system with the web telescope because there were there, you are, because there were radial velocity indications of its presence. That's the Doppler waddle technique. The planet we found isn't what we have predicted. It's about twice as massive, a little further from its star, and has a different orbit from what we expected. The cause of this discrepancy remains an open question. That's actually a really important thing because if we've got it wrong when it comes to interpreting these radial velocity measurements of stars, then we need to know that because there's a lot of work being done about things like hot jupiters and all the rest of it. Things we've talked about before. So what is this planets several times the mass of Jupiter in an elliptical orbit one that's not circular, excuse me, but it's fainter than expected at shorter infrared wavelengths, and that suggests, first of all, that it has probably got a cloudy atmosphere, but there may be carbon based molecules in the atmosphere. Methane, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide are being suggested. But the cool bit of this, and it really is, is it's temperature. The average temperature of this planet two degrees celsius. Wow, yeah, it's now. That's so it's a Jupiter or more than Jupiter mass planet Jupiter is a gas giant in our own Solar system, which is at about minus ninety something like that minus ninety five or thereabout degree celsius way out in the Solar system, so it's very cold. So this one is relatively warm compared with our gas giants, but it is much cooler than any other exoplanet that has been observed directly, and there's about twenty five that we've seen directly. And the problem, by the way, in imaging a planet directly is that you're blinded by the lights of the star that it's going around, because the star is right next door to it and it's yet to a brillion times brighter. So you've got to take away the light of the star. That's done by means of an instrument called a corona graph, and if you can do that cleverly enough, you can leave an image of the planet itself nestling in the sort of outer light of the star. That's what's happened here. So the issue is, as I said, it's colder than any other exoplanet. That makes it harder to observe because of an exoplanet that's warm emits more energy. Now this star is actually it's because its name implies, because it's got an A after it epsilon in the A. It's the main star in a system of three other stars, so it's a triplet system. It is a red dwarf star, and that doesn't surprise us because red dwarfs are the easiest ones to observe when it comes to subtracting the light of the star because they're relatively faint, smaller, and cooler than the Sun. And the the point about this star is that it's hits elderly. It's probably the same age as the Sun a well a half billion years, and most of the extra planets that have been that have been observed directly have been around much younger stars, so they're much younger in there in the you know, in their life history. So this one's really interesting from that point of view. It's a mature planet, probably been around for four or five billion years, it's going around a cool red dwarf star, and and is in an unexpected orbit. So there's a few little mysteries to solve there. And just foot note that you might know more about than me. Andrew Hits well, I know, I think I know where you're going. Yeah, it features I think this star and fictional planets around. The staff featured on a number of science fiction movies and games like Halo. Yeah, Halo, which I played when it first came out with my boys. We loved Halo. That's a franchise that's still. Going to the keep releasing new versions of the game. Even made it into a TV series which lasted I think two seasons. But yeah, it's featured in Halo, it's featured in books, and it was a pretty popular place in Star Trek episodes. So Epsilon Indie is well known to the science fiction community. There you go. Yeah, But what's interesting is I don't think ultimately this will be the oldest and coldest planet we ever find, but it is at the moment, and the gas giants in our Solar System are colder. What does that mean in terms of of how gas giants age or is it just to do with proximity to the star? Maybe yes, I mean we think that gas giants get big because they are cold. And you know, in the Solar System, the gas giants are all beyond the frost line. So that means that water they put the commonest too element molecule in the universe, could could freeze out, and so probably what you've got is a rocky core with a very heavy, massive, pretty dense layer of ice around it. But it may be that this planet, like the one we were talking about in the last but one episode of space Nuts, has migrated into a closer orbit and that might push its temperature up. Ah Okay, well, yeah, I suppose that's something they'll be able to analyze if they can collect the data. It's such a I mean, it's not. It's not a long way away from us, but it's still a long way, you. Know, that's right, it is. So yeah. So it's a very nice piece of work, and the team I think, are expecting to observe other relatively nearby planets to look for even colder ones. As you said, I don't suppose it'll hold the record for long. No, probably not. You can read that story on NASA spaceflight dot Com if you want to know more about it. While we're talking about Jupiter, though, fred I read a story just in the last few days about the storm the red spot and how it's getting smaller, and when you look back through recent history, it's really shrunk a lot, although it's still big enough for Earth to fit inside barely though. But they think they know. Why it's getting smaller. It's running out of stuff to eat. Apparently they think it fed on smaller storms. But those storms are diminishing as well, so the red spot doesn't have any sustenance and therefore is losing weight. Basically interesting, very interesting. This is space Nuts. Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a little break from the show to tell you about our sponsor in Cogny. Now, if you use the Internet, chances are you've registered your name, your address, your phone number, your credit card details on one or more or many websites. Occasionally those websites will get infiltrated and that data gets sold on the dark web. And there was a case recently where thirteen million people most likely had their medical data sold through the dark web. Thirteen million. Now what happens to that data, Well, it could be just about anything. Data is available commodity these days. It's used to create fake ID, it's used to enable people to make spam email, spam phone calls and spam emails. It can lead to you being scammed. 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Each plan varies in price, but if you pay for an annual plan upfront, it really drops the price significantly over the course of a year. But if you want to pay month by month, you can do that too, and don't forget comes with a thirty day money back guarantee. A thirty day money back guarantee. All you have to do is log in, create an account, and sign up for whatever deal suits you at incognit dot com slash space nuts and don't forget the coupon word space nuts. Surprisingly, so that's in Cogni dot com slash space nuts and the coupon code space nuts. Now back to the show. Mir name piece Buds. Now to a rocky planet that we only rarely talk about, named Mars. This is a really fascinating story, and again, like we discussed last week, involves a rover making a discovery. Last week it was finding sulfur. This week it's finding these these what they've described as leopard spots on rocks on the planet's surface. This is the Perseverance rover. What's really interesting about this story is these spots may mean something rather significant. That's right. So it's a rock that is about probably ninety by sixty centimeters three feet by two feet in the all measure, and it's got a name. It's Hook. Pronouncing this correctly, Chow the falls it's named after I believe, a feature in the Grand Canyon. I think that's right. So that rock has all sorts of interesting aspects to it, which is puzzling scientists as to how these various features can exist in one rock because they seem to be you know, some of it suggests that there's a lot of a lot of hot water been involved. With this too hot for anything to live in, and yet we've got these what have been called leopard spots, tiny little white spots which I think have a black ring around them, and they are on Earth the sort of thing that you find when you've got fossilized microbes. They're similar to what we find in rocks where you've got fossilized microbial activity on Earth. So this is why people are very excited about this rock. Is it the first evidence of having been life, living organisms on Mars or is it purely chemical? And apparently the mission scientists who are working on this have kind of analyzed this thing to death. They've used every piece of technology that they've got on the spacecraft. They've zapped it with a laser, they've kind of looked at it with the spectrometers, they've looked at it with their mass spectrometers. They've really done everything to analyze it, and they still don't really have an answer as to whether this is the result of life or not. The only way we'll get that answer is by bringing it back, and there is their emissions being planned to bring rocks back to Earth from Mars so we can analyze them with laboratory instruments on Mars. But this is not likely to happen. Well, they're talking about twenty forty now, that return mission been pushed back and pushed back, and I'm not even sure whether the return mission that was being plumbed actually included rocks as big as this one. I think it was more for the you know, the caches of soil that have been collected on Mars and left in little piles on the surface of the planet. Yeah, it's very disappointing to hear that, because we all want to know, We all so very much want to know, and you know, we're finding telltale signs that life may have existed on Mars when it was a hot or wetter place. And how long. That life, if it did exist, survived is another big question. Yeah, but pushing it back to twenty forty, I mean, that's that's a gut punch, really, isn't it. It is. My understanding is that NASA. NASA is concerned about how much it costs to do that, and. It isn't isn't it The biggest question, well, in all of existence, is whether or not there is life in life beyond. I mean, isn't it worth spending a couple of bucks to find out. Yeah, I think it's eleven and a half billion. Is the current Trump. Change or should I say Trump change? No, it's it's a. Yeah, it's not a lot really easy. The what what I was going to say is that as I understand it, NASA is trying to interest the private sector into doing this. So if you can get a company that's prepared to invest a lot of money in a mission like this, that could be you know, certainly would put that company on the map, wouldn't it. You know, if you think thinks it's probably yeah, there's probably a couple of companies that could already do it, Yes, and it wouldn't make much of a dint in their value. So maybe they should be negotiating. I think that maybe what's happening, maybe we'll hear something, you know, all this sort of thing goes on behind the scenes as always. I mean, Elon Musk is planning to colonize Mars. Problem solved, Yeah, it's truly. He needs to know. He needs to know if there's stuff that's already colonized, and that might for the answer to that, yeah. Could be. Now that it is really fascinating story and well worth reading the whole thing. But yeah, we've. Been toying with the idea of life on Mars since I don't know the year dot. Yes, and the more we look, the more the evidence stacks up that it probably did exist. We just can't sort of nail that thing down. But time will tell. And of course it's not the only target in the Solar system, that's right. The ice moons are. Certainly areas of interest as well. Uh, let's move on to our final story, Fred, And this dates back a couple of years when when you were just a young fella. And then it involves a Danish astronomer named tiko' bry. He's in the news, but when you consider how long ago he was doing what he was doing, this. Is a bit of a surprise. Well, yes, he's well, he's one of the great names in astronomy. He just very briefly. He grew up in the Danish nobility. In fact, this is really interesting. So I have a whole one of my books had a whole chapter on Tikot and I've been to where he lived and worked many times. So's it's it's been very much part of my you know, my own astronomical journey. But he he was stolen from his parents by an uncle and brought up by them. Apparently that was quite common back in the day. But he was a Danish nobleman, all set for a career in diplomacy and things like that. But he discovered astronomy partly because of a super andover to go sup and over in fifteen seventy six, I think it was got mad keen on astronomy started building instruments. The king at the time, King Frederick the Second. I think it was good King fred He gave him this island in the US, which is the strait between modern day Sweden and Denmark, not very far from Copenhagen, and the island is called Vain. It's now then it was Hven in those days because it's part of Sweden now rather than Denmark. But anyway, he built this castle there called Iraniborg, which was fitted with all kinds of astronomical equipment. He basically in the fifteen eighties decided that wasn't good enough. He recognized that this castle with his astronomic instruments, was full of vibrations, so that limited how much he could measure things. So he built an underground observatory called Stiernborg underground in the sense that it was you know, there were crypts which were dug into the soil of vein, and he put his instruments there and had it covering on them to protect the weather. But they were completely open and these weren't telescopes. This was just before the invention of the telescope, so they're all naked eye observations. But he managed to make measurements accurate to about twenty seconds of arc, which were what allowed Johannes Kepler, who was one of his students, to formulate the laws of planetary motion. That took a bry's life in a nutshell. Yeah, amazing. But the point is that he also, as many scientists did in those days, tinkered with alchemy, the idea of you know, the elixir of life or forgotten what it was called the philosopher's stone. That was it. That was the philosopher's stone, the thing that will give you eternal life plus turning things into gold, all of that. He tinkered around with that, and unfortunately Tucco's castle was destroyed after his death. In fact, he may even have been before his death, because he left the island of Vain when Frederic's son Christian took over, and Christian didn't like Frederick. Sorry, he didn't like Tiko, so booted him off the island. And anyway, the last few years of Tuco's life were not very pleasant. But the locals essentially demolished the castle because he'd been a bit of a tyrant gottening the island, and they took all the stones from the castle to build their own houses, which is kind of what you do if the boss leaves. And so it's only remnants that are found of the castle, but some shards of material, including glass and ceramics, which probably came from Tiko's equipment. They were excavated back in the late nineteen eighties and they've been saved, but they've now been analyzed in detail by scientists at the University of Southern Denmark who've produced some very interesting results. And this is using you know, twenty first century analytical techniques, laser ablation and all sorts of things like this to discover what was in these samples of the you know, the containers that Tuco used, and it turned out there was nickel copper's inked in antimony tungsten, gold, mercury, and lead on the shards. And these are ones that are very much mainstays of an alchemist's laboratory. And I'm quoting the Cosmos Magazindiot's a lotly way to put it. They are too, the the interesting one that has produced a bit of a puzzles tungsten, that's right. Tungsten wasn't really known at that time, and yet it's found in Tuco's laboratory. And this is you know, what a what an interesting, interesting suggestion. Maybe he was more ahead of his time than we thought he. Was possibly, so, yeah, fascinating. And so they've only just kind of happened across this now they they've now that they've done the analysis, that's right, makes you makes you wonder what he was up to. Yeah, that's right. He was, you know, he was the one person scientific institution, and he brought scientists from all over Europe to work with him. They were, you know, his laboratory assistants and his colleagues. He he was very much into the modern way of doing science. Because he realized he had to publish everything. He ran out of paper for his publication, so I built a paper mill and made paper on the island. Totally entrepreneurial, an extraordinary person. And you know, maybe he was even more extraordinary than we knew before from this recent work. Yeah, it's a pity it sort of came to a grinding hold the way it did, by the sound of things. But he did, he did have a legacy because of his students went on to bigger and better things, and that's probably one of his great achievements that he made. He inspired others to do wonderful work. Most notably Kepler with his planet loads of planetary motion. But he was also into what we now called prosthetic surgery. He lost most of his nose in the sword fight when he was nineteen, and he tinkered around with copper and brass to make a false nose, the other silver and gold one on Sundays, you know as well. It was in contact with with people who were doing the same sort of thing. Quite quite amazing, incredible bloke. Yeah, I should make a movie about him, but actually they should, and they may well have done in Denmark, just too possible. Just to clarify, his name was actually Jugo Brauer, that's how it would have been pronounced. But it's latinised TIKOBRAI we pronounce it. That, and some people would pronounce his first name Tycho. And it reminds me of the TV series The Expanse, which had a space station in it named Tycho's Station. That's where it came from. Yep. I always wondered. I didn't look it up. But now I know. Yeah, that is really really great story and if you would like to read it, as Fred mentioned, it's in Cosmos Magazine dot com. One more thing before we finish up, Fred, Those who listen to our podcast could be using any number of platforms, but one of the platforms that's fallen by the wayside is Google Podcasts, and we did have quite a few people that used Google. Google has basically asked all the people who used Google podcast you've probably got an email about it, maybe even this week. I got one today saying if you subscribed to podcasts on Google and you can no longer access them, you can still transfer them to YouTube. So if you haven't done that yet, you can transfer all your podcasts, including Space Nuts, from Google podcast to the YouTube platform, where I will always remind you to hit the subscribe button if you haven't already. I just wanted to let you know about that. Fred. We're done for another day, Thank you, sir, pleasure. Oh as always always good to talk about these things. Thank you very much, Andrew, not a problem. We'll catch you again soon, Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large, and. Don't forget here in this udeo. There you go, I remember it, and from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. Catch you on the very next episode of Space Nuts. See you then bye bye. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast. Available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bites dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.